Tag: makers academy

Usually I can do my current job from home, which means no commute and so I have more time for the Precourse. Unfortunately, I’d been having internet issues last week, so I had to go to the office but also doing the course work from home was a bit more tricky (#hotspotlife).

Most Important Things I Learned:

Need to get physically away from a problem, if I can’t solve it

Creating a ticket on stackoverflow shows similar tickets and better results than their search!

Things I Struggled With The Most:

Timing – due to no internet at home/working full time, I feel like I’m about half a week or so behind, but luckily my last day at work is this Thursday, so I’ll be able to catch up

Classes – getting the hang of them (as JavaScript doesn’t have Classes, the concept was completely new to me)

Changes I Plan to Make Next Week:

Aim for 3-5 Katas (on Codewars.com) a day, I want to have at least Rank 100 by EOW

Trying the Pomodoro technique (which is basically working for 25 minutes without any distraction followed by a 5 minute break)

Other Experiences This Week:

Maker’s assigned each of us a mentor who we can pair with. My mentor is already working on his final project so hopefully I can put in some pair-programming time with him before he finishes. Generally, this is a great idea and it will give us the chance to programme with someone who’s more experienced and ask the 100 million questions that come up during the challenges 😀

Changes I Plan to Make Next Week:

Other Experiences This Week:

Using Slack (our communication channel) makes me feel part of the community despite being unable to attend day-time learning groups

If you want to pass the challenges, you need to follow the instructions to the letter – things like different file names cause the tests to fail

Bottom line:

We covered a lot of material in the first week and looking back, it’s crazy to think it’s only been a week of studying – 6 days to be fair, since on the first day we didn’t get any material! I’m definitely enjoying it so far, despite my head hitting my desk occasionally. 🙂

During the first week of the precourse, we’re focussing on learning about the command line and version control.

For the past few months I’ve been doing a series of courses on the website coursera.org about responsive web design. The courses talk about programming languages such as HTML, CSS and Javascript, and also uses the Meteor framework which runs on MongoDB. So during the courses I’ve learnt the mere basics about using the terminal/command line (‘cd’, ‘mkdir’, how to ‘add’/’remove’ packages to our meteor projects, view the db etc). As the course teaches quite a broad spectrum, they didn’t really go into the whys and hows of the command line, so I’m pleased to actually really focus on it now in the precourse.

I think the hardest thing for me is to see using the commands in the terminal like any other programming language. Just like in JS, we’ve got functions that take arguments, we can run them and we can get something in return, change something, etc. I know the terminal can do more, but me and my brain are taking one step at a time!

My favourite command is obviously ‘man’ – a saviour!

One of my fellow maker’s students has also told me he’s done the command line track on codecadamy.com. After I’ll finished the Maker’s material on the command line, I want to do this 2-hour track as well – having different types of learning input will definitely be helpful! (I believe they have also one on git – wahay 🙂 )

First day of the precourse is done and I can’t wait to start! Today we, the February cohort, met up and had the change to get to know each other a little bit. The group is quite international which makes it an interesting bunch – I believe we cover 4 continents!

Other than that we we’re given more info about the schedule of the precourse. We will have learning material for every week to work through and then on Fridays we’ll be given a weekend challenge. They emphasised on working in pairs/groups for the exercises which will help us getting used to pair programming, a method we’ll be using throughout the course. The weekend challenges are designed to be done on our own, so we know we’re were at and, importantly, so the coaches know how we’re doing.

They also suggest to code everyday during the 4 weeks – so I’ll end this blog here and get on some codewars.

Tomorrow is finally the day when the precourse will start. We will meet at the Makers Academy building and get to know each other and find out what we’ll be doing for the next 4 weeks.

I can’t wait to get started but I’m a little bit nervous as well, as I’ll be working full time alongside for the first three weeks of the precourse. During my interview with Makers they recommended giving yourself at least 15 hours a week for this precourse, so technically working should be fine. They also said, however, that having more time will be beneficial and someone even recommended taking time off work if possible.

On the other hand I see it as a good way of getting used to the busy and long schedule of the actual course.

So far the preparation for the precourse seemed well organised. We’ve been sent information on how to set up our machines for it, including which software/apps we need to stay in touch with other class members and staff. It’s nice to be able to feel prepared 🙂

my name is Anne and I will be doing a coding bootcamp starting this February! The bootcamp I’ve chosen is called Makers Academy and will last for 12 weeks + 4 weeks pre & prep course. I want to document my path to becoming a junior web developer as well as blog about my experience with Makers, which might help other people who also consider changing careers and making coding their own.

If you want to find out more about the MA, I recommend taking a look at their website: makersacademy.com. As I do the course, I’ll happily review them in more detail, of course!